Tag Archives: ben berman ghan

I’m pumped to have Ben Berman Ghan drop by and answer some questions about his debut novel, Wychman Road!

Ben Berman Ghan is a Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer, novelist, and student at the University of Toronto where he studies literature and English.

Wychman Road is his first novel, and the first book in his series The Wychmen Saga for Zharmae Publishing Press. When not writing, Ben is being distracted by cats, snow, and what he suspects to be aliens camping out nearby. His mind currently holds over half a century’s trivia on comic books, and he finds writing about himself in the third person very strange.

You’ve worked on Wychman Road for a long time, right? How many iterations has it gone through? How has it evolved over time?

Yes! Oh man, yes. I started working on the very first draft of Wychman Road right at the end of 2011. I finally had a finished version of the rough draft a year and a half later in 2013, and I was only 17 at the time. It went through a lot of changes.

One of the biggest was amendments to the timeline. Originally Joshua Jones was born in 1915 and got his powers in the midsts of the great depression. But I set it back to 1899. Joshua was also initially to act like a recovering drug addict, but I dropped that as well. Also, Christopher Patera [the main antagonist] once dressed like a flamboyant sixties gangster, but sadly it had to go as the darker, far more serious villain took his place. Nothing about the original Christopher survived from the first draft to the printed page.

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Was the friendship between Joshua and Peter always the core focus, or did that crystallize as you honed in on a final draft?

Yes! My intention was always making this book about the friendship between these two characters. This is a kind of love story, in that it isn’t a love story. I also wanted to write a friendship between two male characters where they are allowed to love each other. No ulterior motive, no manipulation or masculine sensitivity. They just love each other. I think, whatever else, I, at least, achieved the relationship I wanted.

I was fascinated by the glimpses we got of Thought Walker society–the truces, the arcane relationships. Where did these ideas come from?

Thought Walker society is a marriage between Mafia movies and vampire lore. Immortality, infection, can’t enter other’s property, mixed with that strange, almost violent loyalty and structure. I have this idea that if I dive too much into the realm and politics of The Thought Walkers, it won’t be any fun (Hearing about Jedi in the originals was great, being always surrounded by them in the prequels was boring).

That being said, I am going to dig slowly into it! The mythology of Christopher and his siblings will slowly begin to affect the story more and more until the series reaches its climax. There will be six books in total; the Families will become more of a presence with each addition.

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What’s coming in the sequel?

I think they’re a couple of ways to describe book 2. One part is very much Joshua vs. Christopher. But the second book also serves as the origin story of Allison Kair, where she came from and what happened to her and Joshua so long ago that affected them so drastically.

Additionally, now that Clair knows what’s going on around her, she will be far more active in the second book. We learn a bit more about her, and she kind of sets herself up as Joshua’s moral opponent. A part of this story is the abuse of power. Honestly, a huge part of where my idea came from was watching the original X-Men movies, and being horrified at how okay everyone was with professor X erasing people’s memories. So the Ethics of the Thought Walkers abilities is going to be a part of the sequel in a big way

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What is your favorite thing about Wychman Road–a favorite thing to write, or character, or scene–and why?

My favorite scenes to write are always Peter and Joshua sitting on the porch of Wychman Road just talking. It’s always just a joy to write those scenes. Even though these stories are dark and full of violence and madness, they still sit down and just talk. I’m also strangely proud of a scene about halfway through the book, where Joshua realizes he’s forgotten how to hold a pen. Whenever I go over that it just breaks my heart; I just really liked it as an illustration of this person who’s so lost and so removed from the world he wants to be in he has to remember how to write his name again.

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What are you working on right now? What should readers look for from you next?

Of course, more of the Wychman Saga! book 2 is called The Army of Stone, and it should be out in the early spring of 2017. On my computer right now, I’m very close to finishing the 4th book! Outside that, there is something new that I’m working on, something far more bizarre and loopy, and full of spacemen and aliens and not a villain in sight. But I think that’s all I can say about it right now.

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How can readers stay in the loop and get news about your projects and releases?

FTC disclosure: I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Notes on Diversity:
So, one of the main characters mentions in passing that he’s slept with men and women both. Given that this character is from a different era, and given what I know of the men from his era, I’m honestly unsure as to whether he would accept the label of bisexuality, but there is a mention of queer sexual practice.1

The landlord of the two main characters is named Claire Kamal. She’s described as dark-skinned, brown-haired, and brown-eyed. Y’all, it seems pretty safe to say we have a canonically brown woman in the book. Very little is revealed about her other than this description; for instance I can’t tell you if she is Muslim or Hindu or anything else.2 Just that she is very probably brown.

diversity meter says ‘meh’

It’s not a very diverse book. It’s the story, essentially, of how two white, cis (super)abled young men process very different kinds of masculinities in the frame of a friendship they both need. If you really don’t want to read a book about two white dudes palling around with superpowers and having friend-feelings they can’t hide from each other, then this is probably a pass for you. And that’s ok. That’s why I put the diversity thingie right up front.

But that’s not to say this is a bad book at all.

Review:
The world of Ben Berman Ghan’s Wychmen Road is like ours, except it has a secret. There is a hidden society of Thought Walkers who live among us: they can read our minds and change them. They don’t age, and they’re incredibly hard to kill. They are stronger than us, faster than us, telekinetic, and most of them no longer consider themselves bound by human law.

they are coming to crush all our junkyard cars

Joshua Jones is one such Thought Walker: a man who’s been using his abilities to slip along the fringes of regular human society unnoticed, using his compelling/persuasive power (think Kilgrave) to gently coax a bed for the night or a muffin from a coffee house when he needs it.

Peter Axelson starts the book as a normal kid, a teenager in Toronto about to embark on his senior year of high school. A celebratory night out on the town with his friends turns grisly when they cross paths the man hunting for Joshua Jones. The chance encounter leaves Peter’s friends dead and Peter with the same bizarre abilities as Joshua. Peter finds himself drawn to Joshua, and from there, the plot thickens.

On the surface, this is a story about how Joshua must come to a reckoning with his past and how Peter must come to a reckoning with his future. The abilities they both have come with a price: while incredible, the other Thought Walkers know about them. The Thought Walkers have their own code of conduct and honor (I’d love to see this built out more in the next installment) but its clear from Peter’s introduction that winding up on their radar is Bad News. The plot hinges on these choices: will Joshua succumb to the things he’s done in the past to survive? Are these things that Peter will have to do to survive himself?

But at a deeper level, I think, this book serves as an interesting exploration of male friendship. The central theme is not running, but staying. It’s a book about a creating a safe place and a home–the title refers to the street where they rent an apartment, something Peter insists on for stability’s sake, and something that Joshua hasn’t done for a long time. It’s a book about found family, and rooting yourself in people who accept you, and it does so very openly, and is about two men having Feelings On The Page in a way that is, frankly, refreshing.

Part of it is because they are mindreaders, sure. But a lot of this is because of the characters themselves. Peter is just a sweet, open guy. Joshua is not, at first, but he opens himself up to Peter bit by bit. I love books about immensely important friendships, and this book definitely qualifies.

SUPERHERO BROMANCE LOVERS REJOICE!

Again, diversity is not the book’s strong suit. And the book is not particularly great with it’s woman characters, either. It features an event I would consider to be a fridging. Claire Kamal has some depth and shading, but honestly, a woman that clumsy probably has an inner-ear medical issue she probably would have gotten checked out by now. I was intrigued by Joshua’s paramour, Alice/Allison, but she was in and out of the book so fast that I didn’t know what to make of her. Here’s to getting more of a glimpse of her in the next book.

I’m hoping for better-defined woman characters in book 2 of the Wychmen Saga, but I’ll definitely be picking up book 2. Ghan may have put all his eggs into a relationship between two white men, but, hell, at least he made them care deeply about each other. And they let each other know that more than once. And that made me care about them, too.

1Good god that sounds clinical. Ok. What I mean to say is that Joshua, our lover-of-both-genders was born and came of age in the early 1900s. He’s been alive this whole time since, “dancing” (as he puts it) with his partners, but there’s no real guessing how he does or does not apply more modern queer lingo/labels to himself. I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about this (mostly because I just love queer characters so much). Like, did he not pursue men until after he got those weird powers and was talked into seeing himself as superhuman/above human morality? Or did it predate? We do see him on a date with a young woman before the powers thing, means it’s possible, but doesn’t confirm or deny anything, I guess. Anyway. All I’m saying is that without more in-text interrogation I’m really unsure about how Joshua would actually self-identify regardless of the glimpse of sexual history he’s disclosed to Peter. NO YOU ARE OVERTHINKING THIS.

2We learn a little about Claire’s relationship to her mother, but that doesn’t shed any light on this. And this doesn’t have to be important at all! Brown people are not defined by their religion, their parent’s religion, anything like that. But I am saying that for two mindreaders to live with Claire in a mostly white city and not accidentally eavesdrop on her experiencing any racial tension, or not to overhear any traces of, say a different culture she may have ties to, leaves me feeling very much that she is brown only skin deep. They are mindreaders who are literally messing around in her brainmeats. I don’t know a single brown person who doesn’t think about the fact that they are a brown person every day. They never heard anything?

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Pronouns: they/them/their. B R Sanders is a white, genderqueer writer who lives and works in Denver, CO, with their family and two cats. B writes about queer elves, mostly, as featured in their two novels, the award-winning ARIAH and their debut novel RESISTANCE, both of which are set in the same universe. They love drinking coffee and sleeping, but alas, drinking coffee makes it hard to sleep. Stay in touch with B on twitter (@B_R_Sanders) or with their newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bgYFjf